


End of the Line

by NotEnoughTimeOnMyHands



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Rare Pairings, Tipsy posting, alternative universe, write what you want to read
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:34:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotEnoughTimeOnMyHands/pseuds/NotEnoughTimeOnMyHands
Summary: AU - modern setting. Sansa is on her own and on the run. Can a distant town and an older man be her solace?(Not a solace but loved all the same?!?)
Relationships: Davos Seaworth & Sansa Stark, Davos Seaworth/Sansa Stark
Comments: 17
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is finished... yeah! I’m writing what I’d like to read... Again. I started posting without completing because the last few writing experiences killed my enjoyment and I just wanted to have something out there. Please be kind. 
> 
> All mistakes my own, enabled by a little wine. If you’d like to Beta, I would happily accept but looking for encouragement, not criticism. 
> 
> Thanks to the few authors who have posted with this pair. It really works for me and I encourage you to post more xxx

She’d moved half a world away. Or so it seemed. Exchanging one coast for another. The cooler climate on these remote islands reminder her of the shadow of winter she was so familiar with. What a puzzle it is, to feel like home and to have nothing of it.

Sansa Stark didn’t plan for this. She had been the model child. The apple of her parents’ eye. But her own immaturity and ambition had cost her dear. 

Stupid child. Stupid, blind, selfish child. 

That’s how she felt. That was the phrase she repeated most often. 

The prince she had dreamt of turned out to be a nightmare. He charmed her; and then some. But the physical separation of Kings Landing soon cemented into emotional distance, as her beloved ruthlessly cut all ties. First cooling communications with everyone she had ever counted on, then followed open hostility. It was easy in the turmoil of bereavement. Her parents and brother Rob, dying in a car accident on the icy roads of the north. Her heartbroken siblings struggling to regroup, they hadn’t the presence of mind to consider what was taking place so far from them.  
And all the while, Sansa played along or suffered along. The change from willing participant to captive so blurred in her memory.

There were signs. Joffrey had never been humble, never been restrained. It was easy to overlook his failings as youthful exuberance for so so long. Her own inexperience masking what she now couldn’t deny. Sansa had been so blinded by her own desires for romance. Though the signs had been there from the beginning. However, it soon became more than apparent. The callous words so easy spilled, morphed into pushes and those evolved into split lips and bruised ribs. The truth was evident but there were so few to see now. Escape wasn’t inevitable but essential. The questions that remained; how and where to go?

In the end she had Joffrey to thank for the means and opportunity. The opportunity was his overdose, on lord knows what. He was a frequent user of cocaine but even with Sansa’s limited knowledge of class A drugs, she knew it went beyond that. The means was yet another of his failings. Joffrey loved money. He needed for people to see him spend it, despite the fact he hadn’t earned a penny himself. Being part of the ‘affluenza’ made the Centurion essential and the piles of disposable cash just as dispensable. 

When the EMT took him and his harried entourage, she was an after thought. At first she hadn’t realised, at first she had felt lost and abandoned. The private booth in the VIP lounge was silent and still, and so was she. When the shock began to subsided she’d found the cash, she’d found the card and she’d moved like she hadn’t before. 

Run. Run and hide. And she had. 

Sansa kept the card three days, reasoning that it wouldn’t be a priority given the circumstances. She took every penny she could, though it couldn’t be measured against her suffering. She didn’t want his money but practicality demanded she take it. What would she live on? What did she have but her refined upbringing and her pretty courtesies? 

When caution dictated, she left the card behind and paid cash, moving from town to town, changing direction and creating distance between herself and the past that she longed to leave behind.

When she finally arrived there, Storm’s End seemed like a haven. A quaint little fishing town with enough of a transient population to accept newcomers at face value. The end of the world but the beginning of the ocean was enough to stop her running. 

Sansa found a modest job, cleaning rooms at an inn and a community library with books enough to forget the regrets of her past and delay the grief she’d only begun to measure. Weeks followed days and soon she was resident there, a routine of surviving independently as she hadn’t before.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa and Davos move from being strangers to more. Still firmly in the friend zone.

Weeks so easily give way to months as Sansa toiled away at the inn and on herself. Though she’d mostly been reading fiction from the small library to escape, she’d also dipped into some holistic self help. A first step, just dipping her toe in the water but she recognised that her past wasn’t a healthy template for the future. 

She learned to appreciate the coastal air. The fresh and sometimes chilling breeze that blew in off the water. Layered up to stave off the cold, she walked to the harbour; sometimes watching the water lap at the stone, occasionally seeing the roiling, chopping waves that troubled the coast when a storm arrived. She found it cleansing, in all weathers. A stiff spine from the freezing wind was just as freeing as the sparkling sun on the water, provided you were dressed for it. 

She’s watched the boats come and go and she’s learned to recognise the faces. The gossip in work and her conversations in the community had given names to some of the faces but mostly they remain strangers. 

Gendry wad her first harbour friend, her first in Storm’s End too. She was careful given her past, maybe reluctant to let people in, but he was too friendly to be ignored and too kind to be dissuaded, no matter how firm she aimed to be. 

His encouragement pushed her to be social; she visited the tavern for the first time, met new people, learnt more names. 

It was in the tavern she first meets Matthos, he patiently answered her questions about the harbour; of the boats and the people she saw working on them. Sansa learnt that Matthos’ father is one of the faces she’s come to recognise. When she asks, Matthos tells her about his boat building, mentioning the skill he carefully executes and the successful business he’s built for himself. 

Sansa had quickly noticed Davos; drawn to his measured movements, his considerate working of the wood. Though she’s only distantly observed, she thinks him the antithesis of Joffrey. Davos is a calm in the storm, a beacon of what she hopes for herself and her future. 

Many weeks later, they meet at the tavern. Two strangers in a group of friends, acquaintances and people just passing through. Gendry and Matthos try to orchestrate an introduction; try to sit them near each other, attempting topics they might have a shared interest in. 

They have little success, one holds their feelings in while the other holds them back. Nervousness and suspicion abound. Gendry and Matthos feel disheartened. The next time they meet there are half measures but the idea of promoting friendship or more fades until they forget that it was ever a fleeting notion to begin with. 

Occasionally Matthos, supported my his younger brothers, would gently encourage their father to consider Sansa, to notice what they see as her notice of him, but he dismisses it all with a slight frown but always gentle words. What is an old man like him, an old sea dog, to someone like this beautiful woman? 

He’d seen her from the beginning, noticed her each day when she found her way to the harbour. He’d watched her as she closed her eyes to soak in the warmth of the sun on the coolest spring morning. He’d seen strands of rich auburn hair fly from beneath her hood to whip in the strong breeze as storm after storm blew in. He’d watched her smiling at the seals who bobbed round the boats, searching in the flotsam and jetsam of the shore for their evening meal.

She was a queen; enigmatic, elegant and strong. No, he could be nothing to her, no matter the fancies of his son and his friends. Davos wouldn’t allow it. For her sake and for his own. Though they kept company together, frequently in the same group, though they got to know each other, he tried to hold back. Still there was a draw. They both felt it. Time and circumstance made possible the situation he wanted to avoid; and they became friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the kudos and comments so far. I appreciate the support - I’ve not always found that. I realise this is a bit of a niche ship but I really enjoyed the few works available for this pair!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Final instalment of this ficlet. Thanks for the kudos and comments.  
> More notes at the end xx

More months passed and Davos had begun to realise that what he had denied to his sons, what he had denied to himself, it was no longer feasible to refuse. He wanted her but he had no idea how to woo her; she hadn’t been born the last time he’d actively pursued a woman. Then there was the unfortunate circumstance of him distancing himself, his frequent but ever polite coldness. 

He knew his sons suspected; for all his feigned disinterest they offered explanations if Sansa was absent from the tavern. They updated him on details about her life; her move from the inn to working in the library, her slow going apartment hunting. 

Another significant problem was that they were rarely alone. That was by accident, more than by design, but there was always an unsuspecting chaperone, someone to buffer his lack of conversation. She’d long ago stopped actively trying to get to know him, his short answers and obvious disinterest finally hitting home. Sure Sansa still smiled when she greeted him, she was courteous to everyone after all , but he suspected he’d ruined his chances from the get go. 

Davos needed advice, but he was loathed to broach the subject with anyone. He trusted his boys and his friends not to gossip but he didn’t trust any of them not blow it out of all proportion. Try as he might he couldn’t find a route out of situation for all the thought he put into it. Hours in his workroom, running implausible scenario after implausible scenario through his head, finally made him accept that he needed help. He had little option other than to confide. 

Matthos was his first port of call, and of course he insisted that his brothers pitch in to help. Their reaction was as overwhelming as he feared but he bore it with silent stoicism, hoping for a positive outcome. There were regular and passioned calls to actions but only vague notions of what that might be. Gendry and others were appealed to but all said the same; a grand gesture was required, something that would at once compensate for his previous behaviour and make his intentions very clear. Not one of them had any notion of what such a gesture might be. 

In the end it had been obvious, circumstance providing the opportunity. Sansa found an apartment overlooking the harbour that she could move into when the current tenants’ lease expired. Davos watched her radiate joy as she told them about it in the tavern. Six weeks and it would be hers, a perfect little home with views of the sea. 

Davos sketched it in his mind before the evening was over and then he worked tirelessly to have it finished on time. He knew what he wanted this to say, so he grafted until he knew he could have it ready. Consequently he spent less time with her, only hearing reports of her plans and where she’d gone. Gendry took her to the antique market to pick up a few items, Gendry helped her acquire boxes to store and move her belongings and Gendry helped her organise a truck to move all her bits and pieces. Was he already too late in expressing himself? He had little reason to doubt her, to doubt Gendry, but he fretted none the less as he continued to work.

When they day came they were all involved in the final plan; Matthos, Gendry and others helping him put everything in place and coordinating the timing so he was there, in her new apartment, when she arrived.

Just like they all planned, Davos was waiting when Sansa unlocked he door, the light of mid morning more than enough to see his cautious expression and his generous gift. 

He was immediately gifted a warm unguarded smile, since he’d caught her so unawares and his heart swelled as he watched the brief expression of confusion give way to an attractive blush that brightened her already beautiful completion. 

In the corner of the sitting room, next to a seemingly mute Davos, was a huge plush looking armchair. The neutral herringbone fabric tastefully accented with multicoloured buttons; large, big enough to lounge and certainly enough to snooze in. Sansa beamed at it and then up at Davos. 

“Is this for me?” Sansa asked.

He watched her, fascinated by the sparkle in her eyes, the joy in her expression, “of course” he replied, a slight roughness in his voice that he doesn’t want to account for. 

“It’s beautiful, Davos. It’s perfect.” She smiled.

He wanted to say something, to explain that upholstery doesn’t come as naturally to him as woodwork but he couldn’t escape the niggling worry that held him there, largely silently. He’s a straightforward man, usually, so he does what he knows will be best. “Sansa, are you and Gendry stepping out?” He asked. 

He watched her as laughter bubbled up but she contained it, it’s presence betrayed in her eyes. “No” she responded plainly and after a moment she followed it up quietly with a phrase she hoped he’d be familiar with, “I ... I like the cut of your jib.”

He smiled; warm, open and affectionate. “Alright then” was all he managed before she stepped forward and he moved to wrap his arms around her. 

“Thank you” she whispered against his shoulder and he pressed his lips to her hair. 

The rest of the day was spent with friends; Davos and Sansa exchanged glances as they moved her belongings in. Neither had to explain the change in their relationship, the warmth between them evident to Davos’ sons and the rest. 

He kissed her that night on her doorstep as he bid her a good evening. They kissed again the next day when Sansa found her way to his workshop after her shift in the library. Their love for each other and their intimacy grew gently but fully as the months passed and as they watched the seasons change the colour of the sea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I explained before but I’m just dipping my toe back into the water after an unhelpful time in another fandom. It kind of sucked the fun out of it. Though I realise this is a rare pairing, you’ve been really kind and I appreciate it! 
> 
> I knew Davos would make her something but I wasn’t sure what. I considered a lot of furniture that she might need - that seemed too practical and a little lacking in romance. Then I thought about a classic Adirondack but that wasn’t quite enough. The chair I based the piece on in this story is something I purchased a few months ago for myself. It’s my reading chair. If you fancy a look it’s called the Achilles armchair by Voyage Maison. I have it in Jedburgh mushroom as pictured on the website. As per the story the buttons are all vibrant colours of the same fabric type. It is oversized and deconstructed on the back and sides - perfect. I love it!


End file.
